ImageMagick — The Complete Guide: Automated Processing and Conversion of Hundreds of Images
ImageMagick is a suite of command-line image-processing tools, together with libraries for programming languages. It has no convenient graphical interface — its strength is automation: one command or a short script handles hundreds of images at once.
ImageMagick
ImageMagick Studio LLC
A command-line suite for processing and converting images in more than 200 formats — automate resizing, cropping and conversion.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Format conversion — more than 200 image formats.
- Resizing and cropping — shrink site photos before sending them or placing them in a report.
- Text and stamps — add a date, a photo number or a project name.
- Compositing and filters — combine images, rotate and correct.
- Use from code — call it from scripts and programs.
Licence and who it suits
Use is completely free, including inside a company and for commercial purposes, and you may even include it in a product. Redistribution must include the licence and give attribution. It is the vendor’s own free licence, GPL-3 compatible, but it is not on the OSI list of approved licences. The tool suits an engineer willing to learn a few commands — for example to bring the output of calculation programs into one uniform format.
Related tools
A graphical interface for batch conversion — Converseen. For manual editing — GIMP. For writing the scripts that drive it all — Python.
Converseen
Faster3ck
Convert and resize hundreds of images at once — prepare site photos and figures for reports, including PDF to images.
Get it from the vendor
GIMP
GIMP team
Advanced image editing — site photos, perspective correction, marking defects and preparing images for reports.
Get it from the vendor
XnView MP
XnSoft
A cross-platform image browser and batch converter supporting more than 500 formats, including RAW and HEIC.
Get it from the vendor
Python
Python Software Foundation
The language behind most modern engineering computation, and its full ecosystem.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
When you have many images and little time, ImageMagick is the most powerful free tool — provided the command line does not put you off.